The Wax Child

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Longlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize

From the internationally celebrated author of The Employees and My Work comes an extraordinary, haunting tale of witchcraft and persecution.

In seventeenth-century Denmark, unmarried noblewoman Christenze Kruckow and several other women are accused of witchcraft. They are rumoured to be possessed by the Devil, who comes to them in the form of a tall, headless man and gives them dark powers. It is said they perform unchristian acts and can steal people’s happiness, cause pestilence, illness, or even death. And once the rumour of witchcraft takes hold, they are all in danger of the stake.

Narrated by a wax doll created by Christenze one dark night in 1620, The Wax Child is an unsettling, dizzying horror story about brutality and power, nature and witchcraft, set in the fragile communities of pre-modern Europe.

Deeply researched and steeped in visceral, atmospheric detail, The Wax Child is based on a series of infamous witchcraft trials that took place in Northern Jutland. Full of lush, vivid storytelling and alarmingly rich imagination, Olga Ravn weaves in quotes from original sources, such as letters, court documents, magic spells, and Scandinavian grimoires.

AUTHOR

Martin Aitken

MARTIN AITKEN has translated the work of contemporary Scandinavian writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard, Peter Høeg, Ida Jessen, and Kim Leine. He was a finalist at the U.S. National Book Awards 2018 and received the PEN America Translation Prize 2019 for his translation of Hanne Ørstavik’s Love. His translation of Olga Ravn’s The Employees was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize. Aitken lives in Denmark.

AUTHOR

Olga Ravn

OLGA RAVN is one of Denmark’s most celebrated contemporary authors. Her novel The Employees, translated by Martin Aitken, was nominated for numerous prizes, including the International Booker Prize and the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. Time Magazine named The Employees one of the 100 Must-Read Books of 2022. My Work won the Politiken Literature Prize in 2020. In collaboration with Danish publisher Gyldendal, she edited a selection of Tove Ditlevsen’s texts and books that relaunched Ditlevsen’s readership worldwide. She has also worked as a critic, teacher, and translator. Ravn lives in Copenhagen.

Reviews

“An intensely poetic portrait of everyday sorcery and female solidarity…The Wax Child is richly evocative, beautiful, creepy, and visceral.” —Aida Edemariam, Guardian

“The story is told by a doll carved from beeswax… a fascinating and totally inhuman consciousness, one of many startling feats in this book.” —Emma Alpern, New York Magazine

This devilishly subversive feminist anthem is one of a kind.” —Publishers Weekly

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“A magnificent book. A true masterpiece of both substance and style.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Ravn’s prose is microscopically alive with historical detail, exquisitely translated by Martin Aitken.” —Catherine Taylor, Financial Times

“Fans of Olga Ravn’s beautiful and weird stories no doubt have this one on their list already, and it very much lives up to the hype. The Wax Child is an eerie, unsettling book.” —Lit Hub

“An utterly strange, mesmeric, eerie, short masterpiece about witchcraft. Whatever it is we are looking for when we read, the thing in our hands has it—that strange, in this case, dark magic.” —The Bookseller

“Ravn rejects the lurid spectacle that witch hunts and trials once provided. Instead, she directs the reader’s attention to the social rewards that witchcraft, as practiced in this novel, offers: namely, friendships with other women and the chance to enact (if not achieve) rebellion against the men and social forces that have circumscribed their lives.” —Irene Katz Connelly, Los Angeles Review of Books

“In The Wax Child, novelist and poet Olga Ravn turns 17th-century terrifying Danish women’s history into a sublime novel of struggle and resilience.” —Shelf Awareness

“The Wax Child is one to remember and return to, a story of power and who wields it, a story of women and how they stick together—and fall apart.” —Madeline Schultz, Chicago Review of Books